If blogging was easy, anyone could do it. Oh, wait…

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Hard to believe it’s been over a year since I wrote anything on this. Kind of fell by the wayside. Pretty sure no one will read this, in a dusty forgotten corner of the Interverse, but I guess it’s really just more of my cathartic splashboard onto which I dump out the dregs of my emotional coffers.

I’be been separated for a year and a half now, divorced since September. I’m getting through life, doing pretty good all things considered.

And yet.

Father’s Day came and went. And not one person wished me a happy Father’s Day. Well, that’s not true. My ex-wife and one co-worker. No family. Not my mom, not my brother. No aunt’s or uncles or any other relative. No cards, no calls.

And of course, then I really have to be honest with myself. What did I do for anybody else? Nothing. No calls, no cards. So, I guess karma’s a bitch, turnabout is fair play, or maybe, you reap what you sow is a little more apt.

I am broken. I can be social, I can be friendly, but the effort involved in sustaining long-term relationships seems to be beyond me. Most of the time, you get out of relationships what you put into them…and I haven’t been making any deposits lately. Okay, maybe for a long time.

Part of it is that I’m a textbook introvert. Social interactions take a lot of energy, and I never seem to have a lot of that. It also takes planning, and deliberation, and follow-through. Other things I’m weak on. Just ask my ex. Baddoom doomp.

I guess if I expect people to take the time, and make the effort, I need to do so as well. I think maybe there’s a part of me, deep down inside, that doesn’t think that it will do any good. That all I face is rejection and denial. Thanks for that, mom & dad.

And so I just don’t try. Even though, time and again, it’s been shown that quality people will try and connect with me, try to establish that relationship. And all I do is sabotage it. And then rue and whine about why I’m so alone.

Sad. And so avoidable. How do you break loose these old, dark, sabotaging thoughts that undercut you before you even get started?

I guess I’ve resigned myself to being alone. I fear that fate…and yet seem powerless to avert it. I know I’m not, and yet, seemingly choose to make it so. Messed up, bent and broken.

The Congressional Budget Office predicts that 23 million people who don’t have health insurance now will get it on one of the exchanges. More than 18 million of them will qualify for a federal subsidy averaging $6,000 a year per person.

Mathy Part Goes Here:

18 Million x $6,000 = $108,000,000,000

Englishy Part Goes Here:

“Federal Subsidies“: (n) pl; – Money the government takes from you in taxes so it can give it back to you in the form of grants to help offset the cost of the health insurance it is making you buy, which you can’t afford to pay on your own because your taxes are so high.

Explanationy Part Goes Here:

It’s okay, because it will always be $108 bil of someone ELSE’S money. For everybody. For everybody the costs will always be covered by somebody else’s (tax) money, which is why it’s free for everybody, even though the government has to subsidize your ability to pay for…the…free…uh…health……care…

O_º

(Sorry, it always seems to kind of break down around the “explanationy” part.)

I love reading frothy, feisty narratives chock full of barely-restrained energy and/or violence, usually but not always merely implied. A rousing tale of woe or exhultation, often accompanied by whimsical, self-deprecating anecdotes. I’d LOVE to be able to spin out a tale like that.

My problem? I just don’t freaking pay attention.

Writers like Sheri Gilmour, Rachel Lucas or Leeann seem to soak in every subtle nuance of their experiences, maintaining an awareness of their surroundings I find truly daunting. Beyond that, they do something nearly incomprehensible to me.

They actually REMEMBER these things long enough to write about them hours, sometimes even days later. Black. Fucking. Magic.

I likely suffer, to a greater or lesser degree, from some form of long undiagnosed and untreated form of ADD. Easily distracted by shiny things. Start and stop conversations randomly, often with no one other than myself. It will be 15 or 20 seconds into a conversation with someone before I even remember their name. Coping skills in these kinds of situations usually involve the liberal application of all sort of appropriately vague personal euphemisms, such as “Buddy” and “Hey you.” I can talk for twenty minutes, catch up on old times, ask about the family, and wish them the best, without ever once using a first name. It’s an essential life skill for someone with my, uh, “condition.”

So, while I often have grand adventures as well as many of those charming personal anecdotes involving a trip-to-the-grocery-store-gone-horribly-horribly-wrong, I’m often in such a state of mental fog that I’m hard-pressed to remember exactly how it is I ended up with six boxes of sanitary napkins instead of jumbo roll paper towels, and how DID I get this bump on my head?

That’s why I have to take so many pictures. They are like little mnemonic memory devices that allow me reconnect key associations between the scattered fragments of random memories. Otherwise, it’s about a 50-50 chance that when someone asks me, “Do you remember the time we went to that one restaraunt with the Big Lobster out front?” I will invariably have to lie through my teeth and fake my way through the conversation with a lot of head nods and “Uh huhs” and laughing at jokes I really don’t understand because, really, it all kind of ceased to exist to me about the time we pulled out of the parking lot. I live in fear that I’ll ever get arrested and have to provide an alibi for something.

The Man: “Where were you at 7:15 pm on the night of June 18th?”

Me: “That’s a great question. I have no frickin clue. Let me see the crime scene photos and I’ll let you know if maybe I was there.”

There’s an old joke that having Alzheimers isn’t all bad, because you get to meet new people every day! Yeah, it’s kind of like that for me.

So, if I really do intent to post anything of meaningful consequence on here, I suppose I’ll need to do a better job of actually paying attention to the world around me. I mean, after all, who’s going to stick around to read a blog if the author is…

Me, well, I like to talk. Sometimes I tend to talk AT people more than I talk TO people; what some affectionately term my “broadcast mode.” I’m probably not half as funny or witty as I think I am, but I generally manage to engage in conversations with other semi-sentients such as myself without causing anyone to hemorrage into their cerebellum, so I guess there’s still hope for me yet.

More than I like to talk, I like to read, and to write. I like snark. I am a snarkophile. I collect, catalog, collate (just realized I didn’t know how to spell that…yup, had to Google it), cherish, preserve and just generally roll myself around in snarky blog posts and comment threads throughout the Unternets.

I guess after hearing “so start a blog already” enough times, I thought I’d give it a show. It’ll likely most be just me carrying on about lolcats, plumbing fixtures and odd, random bodily functions, but hey, it’s the Internet…it’s what we do.

On the off chance you read any of this festering drivel, and, despite all reasonable expectation, find that you actually enjoy it, feel free to comment or drop me an email at: squeezeblog (@) yahoo (dot) com.